Phony Conservative MP 'Hates Taxes' Yet Takes His Pay From Taxpayers!

"Saskatoon-Humboldt Conservative MP Brad Trost receives a six-figure income provided through money from taxpayers, yet on the front page of a newsletter to constituents he avers: "I don't like taxes."

He asserts that "tax and spend governments restrict freedom," and declares that "taxation is ... a form of slavery to the state." Yet, on the second page of his newsletter, he reveals that taxes have economic and patriotic benefits. In a box, replete with a photo, he announces a joint federal/provincial investment of $65,000 to help a Humboldt company get accreditation to add armour to transport vehicles, but refuses to give credit for the gift as coming from "we, taxpayer slaves."

Certainly someone who does not like taxes would have cause to wonder why a free enterprise company seeking to do business with government is unable to achieve accreditation without federal-provincial investments to make its competitive role possible.

Trost earned an annual base salary in 2008 of at least $155,400 for his 27 weeks on the job in Ottawa, with a raise in 2009. In addition, available to him is an annual expense allowance of at least $25,500 and 64 free return airline tickets available during the year for travel between his riding and Ottawa, or anywhere else in Canada. Spouses and dependants, too, have access to flights.

To perform his role as MP in Ottawa, he shares well over $120 million in tax money divided proportionately among the 301 members of Parliament for office expenses that include staff, rent and phones, as well as travel.

While Trost may be perceived to be a slave to his party leader, the taxes he pays have not made him society's slave. Indeed, his own taxes, in a small way, are returned to him in payment for services he renders the public. A quick calculation would reveal how little time it takes for his gross salary to accumulate to $1 million, and continue onward and upward as long as he chooses to run and is elected.

How many of his supporters can make a similar claim to being in the top one per cent of Canada's salary earners? Should taxpayers be embarrassed by the way Trost depreciates their role, my role and his? Does he or anyone else have a better way to pay his salary than through taxes? Does he ever rebel against the way he is being used by his party, as if it were the sole owner of the Canadian treasury that is constantly filled with tax revenue expended by his leader, Stephen Harper, who himself declared in July to a Globe and Mail reporter: "There are no good taxes."

Trost adds insult to injury by insisting that taxation is a restraint on freedom, but leaves it to the reader to decide how taxation restrains his freedom as an MP and ours as Canadian citizens. If he were true to his beliefs, he would argue that Canadians would be better off without Parliament because it a socialistic establishment, totally subsidized by taxes.

Instead, his July newsletter revealed him bestowing a federal cheque for a water improvement project, with his name printed at the bottom as if it was written on his bank account. Hardly honourable behaviour.

Trost, in these times of trouble, asserts: "Taxes and government spending need to go down, not just for a more prosperous Canada, but for a freer one as well." He never tells his constituents how that might happen. Rather, successive newsletters he distributes deal only with his thoughts about marriage, guns, crime and gangs. Missing are "shock" analyses of the spending motions in the House, which are leading to a $50 billion-plus anticipated 2009 deficit.

Trost chooses to restrict his newsletters' intellectual contributions to ridiculing taxes and to maligning all of us who pay them (including himself and his boss), yet his life differs from that of most of his constituents for he lives off "this slavery of the state," as does Harper.